Reddit-like commenting system

The current vanilla commenting system is ok when you're a small website and get 2-10 comments per article, however most of your articles get 20-30, while controversial articles get 100+.

There is no way I have time to read 100 comments. A lot of them are garbage or repetitive as well.

Now Ars isn't behind in this regard. The comments are as nicer and work better than most websites I've been, but there is a more brilliant system and it can be found over at reddit.

With such a system the posts with the highest score will be at the top. The scores are some formula of upvotes, downvotes, score of replies, age. So a post that has 200 upvotes would be at the top, while a new comment with 20 upvotes and 0 downvotes will be above a comment with 50 upvotes, 30 downvotes and is a day or two old.

A system such as this would make comments significantly less frustrating.

Bonus points if you can directly hook into Reddit, although my google search on such tools turned up nothing. Still you could always contact Reddit and see if they would be up for giving you or creating an API to have your commenting system comment directly to Reddit.

Reddit may be full of crap, but so are ars comments. The only difference is that Reddits posts are sorted in a much more meaningful.

We're very familiar with reddit. We've discussed various improvements to our commenting system that we may work on at some point, but we're not interested in adopting reddit's comment model wholesale, it doesn't work for us.

Are you uninterested because you have a much better system you are considering implementing, or because you think your current comment system (ordering from oldest to newest) is better than reddits for Ars articles?

If the first one, then that's cool. If it's the latter, then I fear you are making a blatant misjudgment.

I'm going to assume it's that you have a better idea [or ideas] in the wings...Would it be too much to hear some of the ideas? =D

There are a million forum systems. Ars chose this one years ago and attracted people away from forums using other models - threaded, ratings based, etc. I would say it is a system that works. Promoting popular posts has many problems. Threading does not scale well. You think 100 posts is a lot? There are some 8,000+ post threads around here. Replying to an older post that was comment 4,231 means no-one will ever see it, but by using the quote button so the context is saved and making the post 8,001 ensures that it will be seen.

Reddit's comment system rewards those who seek popularity, either by straight out pitching "content" that is known to be accepted by the slavering masses (eg: the propensity for an entire sub-reddit, let alone a thread to be buried in some stupid meme if the moderators are asleep). Posters, duplicate accounts & bots compete for whoever can whore karma the fastest, and unless you essentially start a subreddit on a topic, which is almost guaranteed to never be noticed, the odd insightful post that goes against the mob mentality is frequently overlooked.

Actually, it creates problems. Slashdot "solved" that over a decade ago, except it was exploitable. Dissenters were drowned out instead of having a voice. Fuck that. That Reddit copied it shows a poor understanding of the problems inherent with the system.

We're very familiar with reddit. We've discussed various improvements to our commenting system that we may work on at some point, but we're not interested in adopting reddit's comment model wholesale, it doesn't work for us.

I can deal with nested comments if they're only one level deep. A parent, and replies, no sub replies inside of that. Some obvious advantages to that system in terms of corralling off side conversations, off-topic stuff, trolls, or promoting interesting content. I could see trying that at Ars (not hinting or anything, just saying I could get behind that idea as something to try I think).

Beyond that though infinite nesting ala reddit is fucking annoying if you actually want to *read* the comments.

Hmmm, I didn't expect so many people to dislike Reddit's commenting system.Keep in mind, I love Reddit, but I have like 20 Karma. I still find Reddit to be the most intellectual general discussion on the web. Stack Exchange is better, but even that has a lot of contrived answers to whore points.

Then you have all of the self posts on reddit, where you don't even get karma. Those spark great conversations.

Enough of defending Reddit, the consensus and more important, the opinion of the Creative Director is that Reddit isn't a good fit, however no one has said a flat comment system is good, and further some people have said it is bad.

So I think improvements should eventually be made. I couldn't think of a way to better present Ars articles, but I know for a fact there are more accessible ways to present the comments for them.

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Now for the defense of Reddit:

"Some obvious advantages to [a one-level nested commenting system] in terms of corralling off side conversations, off-topic stuff, trolls, or promoting interesting content." - Reddit does this better, because if someone starts a new thread, then another has a half relevant reply to add, then the conversation takes a new road, BUT replying to the same original comment. If it uses a multiple level system, then that partially relevant reply to the partially relevant reply can be nest under the first partially relevant reply. If it isn't put there, then people will downvote it and others won't see it (which is deserved, because the comment was written out of context).

"Dissenters were drowned out instead of having a voice." - I think you need to read a book on the art of trolling, or maybe someone needs to write one first. People who try and follow the hivemind get bombarded by trolls. Reddit is not the group think mob that is main stream pop culture; Reddit is chaotic and requires constant attention to present events, as well as novel ideas about those events. You ever see the posts such as "SO BRAVE" or "Repost" or just generally hilarious insults that point out a subtle flaw in someones comment. Those comments keep Reddit humble and clean with novel discussion. Those people discourage the real trolls.Dissenters are the only ones who get upvoted [animal pictures are the obvious exception to this, but that's not even relevant to comments anyways].

"Replying to an older post that was comment 4,231 means no-one will ever see it, but by using the quote button so the context is saved and making the post 8,001 ensures that it will be seen." - Why are you lieing? If I quote comment #1 and I'm comment #8,001 my comment will still not be seen. Quoting an older comment does nothing to the order that comments are displayed. Hence the issue of a flat commenting system.

That gives me another idea... but this post is far too long, so new post!

But yeah, I personally think that Reddit is a mess, and would loathe having to deal with that type of system on Ars. The only thing I wish we had was our fancy Star rating system back just for shits and giggles.

Two ideas:Have a link on a post to a list of replies that quotes this text, then have a link for each quote on a post, back to the original reply and to every other reply.

Pros: - Gives better context to quotes (able to see posts near it in the timeline) - Gives accountability to posts by showing the people who have quoted it and replied to it.Cons: - encourages disgusting quote nesting, so you end up with a 10 word reply that has 1000 words worth of quotes.

Second idea:Allow posts to be +1d [or call it what you want], then allow people to order comments in different ways, such as date, score, or interestingness [some formula between the two].

Pros: - best of both words, vote system, and generic flat comment system - No negative side effects of people feeling like they are being beaten on by being downvoted.

I still think Reddit is optimal, but I really hate flat comment systems.Basically, as is, I read the first 2-3 comments, then skim for a staff comment. All other comments get ignored. I also often leave comments, but I don't expect anyone to read them, because they are so late in the timeline.

Nothing else scales to 8000 post long threads. Karma is bullshit because really old shit remains at the top. Nesting doesn't work because you have to jump all over the place to keep up - this always leads to someone replying to the original post with something that happened 1,000 posts later, nested 8 levels deep because that person replied to an off-topic post instead of the original post. With a flat system I can read them sequentially and, if one post relates to another, I can read the quoted material in that post itself. No jumping back and forth. And we have a lot of really long threads around here, no need to muck them up for the short transient threads.

It comes after post 4000 and before post 4002. That's how chronology works.

In a threaded system, it might be a reply to the first reply to the OP (at the top), a reply to the OP itself (end) or a reply to a reply to a reply somewhere in the middle. That's a lot of scanning back and forth.

It comes after post 4000 and before post 4002. That's how chronology works.

In a threaded system, it might be a reply to the first reply to the OP (at the top), a reply to the OP itself (end) or a reply to a reply to a reply somewhere in the middle. That's a lot of scanning back and forth.

You are supporting my idea, right?I'm trying to show how ridiculous it is to find gems in a large number of comments.

Also, just a tiny bit of background. I've used forums for well over a decade and seen them evolve very very slowly. I'm also a CS guy who follows UX articles and blogs and the odd white paper.

FYI - When you're in the forum if you click the little grey square icon to the left of a thread title it jumps you to the last read post since your last visit. Very helpful for tracking where you are in a long flat thread.

Currently there's no way to do this in the front page comments interface. However I have exploring adding that functionality on my list.

FYI - When you're in the forum if you click the little grey square icon to the left of a thread title it jumps you to the last read post since your last visit. Very helpful for tracking where you are in a long flat thread.

Currently there's no way to do this in the front page comments interface. However I have exploring adding that functionality on my list.

That definitely helps if you want to read every single comment.

I admit that in smaller threads or in a world where people have enough time to read hundreds of comments, this would be the ideal solution.

Don't get me wrong. I know different situations call for different mediums.For personal discussion of opinion social media is best. For open discussion between trusted friends a forum (like this) is best [a good example is having a forum for computer science students at a school]. For open discussion between millions of strangers, I feel a different medium is best... like reddit.Reddit is a completely free posting website, compared to ars, which has specific moderated topics, so they are not the exact same thing, I know this.

I think you also know this. It's definitely not easy to find the best solution.As I said before, I don't know of any other news site that does it better than you guys, so you can't just copy a solution from another news site that has got it right.

Also, just a tiny bit of background. I've used forums for well over a decade and seen them evolve very very slowly. I'm also a CS guy who follows UX articles and blogs and the odd white paper.

So have a lot of us. Hell, we've been here for over a decade. I tend to prefer the flat thread model as well.

I just wanted to make sure people didn't think I was an opinionated 13 year old who just found the internet. I know how rampant profiling can be on the tubes (hell, I need to force myself to re-evaluate peoples opinions sometimes, because i fall victim to profiling others).

For personal discussion of opinion social media is best. For open discussion between trusted friends a forum (like this) is best [a good example is having a forum for computer science students at a school]. For open discussion between millions of strangers, I feel a different medium is best... like reddit.

Emphasis mine.

This is all about what you feel. What you feel doesn't really matter as the people who run the forum have already said it's not going to happen.

Also, there is a lot subjective evaluation criteria to what is "best." Your best may not be my best.

I know threads that the majority of people found interesting would require significantly less scrolling to find if using a voting system for comments, rather than a flat comment system.

I know if comments are nested that it would take less time to find comments replying to other comments, compared to if it was flat, because flat comments would require either scrolling and scanning, and potentially many page flips, while depending on how related a reply is, a nested system would be approximately log(n) clicks, where n is the number of comments you would have to scan to find the comment otherwise (in a flat system).

I can't prove what system is more usable, but that doesn't mean everything is 100% subjective and based on feelings. It's a combination of aesthetic preferences and logical reduction of scanning, scrolling and clicking. Don't underestimate UX as a science.

Side about Reddit:Realize that a large amount of reddit is comedy. People enjoy humour more than anything else, hence why a lot of comments are spontaneous jokes. If you read self posts in specific subreddits tend to be very informative and because the most informative replies are upvoted, you tend to learn a lot from a topic without scanning hundreds of comments.

I'm trying to show how ridiculous it is to find gems in a large number of comments.

When every comment is a gem (aside from news comments, I think this is usually true), there is no need to highlight specific comments for future readers.

Quote:

I know threads that the majority of people found interesting would require significantly less scrolling to find if using a voting system for comments, rather than a flat comment system.

You are thinking of individual comments. We don't run FAQs here, where you want the most relevant at the top (and the few times we do we have moderators to help edit the OP). We have discussions. There is a natural back and forth. Hence almost all posts are valuable, and having older posts supersede newer posts runs counter to the usage model. After you read the post once, you rarely need to go back and read it again later, and for new readers it makes no sense out of context of the dialog.

Quote:

Side about Reddit:Realize that a large amount of reddit is comedy. People enjoy humour more than anything else, hence why a lot of comments are spontaneous jokes. If you read self posts in specific subreddits tend to be very informative and because the most informative replies are upvoted, you tend to learn a lot from a topic without scanning hundreds of comments.

And now you have confirmed that the model of Reddit and Ars are very different That's why things won't be changing here - we're not like Reddit, at all.

Side about Reddit:Realize that a large amount of reddit is comedy. People enjoy humour more than anything else, hence why a lot of comments are spontaneous jokes. If you read self posts in specific subreddits tend to be very informative and because the most informative replies are upvoted, you tend to learn a lot from a topic without scanning hundreds of comments.

And now you have confirmed that the model of Reddit and Ars are very different That's why things won't be changing here - we're not like Reddit, at all.

Ars doesn't have posts that are very informative, with informative replies?

I didn't confirm they are different from that post. I literally confirmed it a few posts back. I'm sorry, but I hate it when people lie about context.

ronelson, the rest of your reply is actually very interesting. If every comment is a gem, then a nested system with voting needlessly complicates the system, however I simply find this is not the case. Most people post interest comments, but a lot of the comments are repeats or bring nothing novel to the discussion.

Also, I've now heard two people say they just want comments rid from Ars; FYI that is a bad sign for the current system.